The really low rate of replies over on PT makes me wonder if lots of people are unable to post replies there. I still can't.

I don't go there anymore. I understand and appreciate the efforts of the mssrs. involved. I just really miss the recent replies sidebar. And the bathroom wall.

--------------"But it's disturbing to think someone actually thinks creationism -- having put it's hand on the hot stove every day for the last 400 years -- will get a different result tomorrow." -- midwifetoad

After spending a couple of hours researching, I decided to delete my Disqus account. No more PT comments from me. AtBC is more fun anyway.

--------------"But it's disturbing to think someone actually thinks creationism -- having put it's hand on the hot stove every day for the last 400 years -- will get a different result tomorrow." -- midwifetoad

It's taken much longer to work out the kinks than I had hoped, but the script to detect and respond to high server load now seems to be working. There was a period of high load this morning that showed up in the logs and was resolved through automated reset of the HTTPD process.

What appears to be happening is bots loading up a bunch of requests for long threads in this message board, which leads to the database chewing up a lot of swap space and things slowing to a crawl. Killing the requests clears that up.

Malevolently designed, more like. Some behind the scenes changes to the server allowed the system to accommodate the load. Before, that much bot traffic wouldn't have raised the "most visits" number because the system would have become unresponsive long before it got that high.

I pulled up "All" for the Uncommon Descent II thread, and got a Google warning of malware danger. Details revealed what site was involved. I went to the database and edited out the image inclusion from that site. I did not add any annotation to it.

If anyone gets one of those warnings, if you would please click the "Details" button and pass along the info here, that would be appreciated. I can't control what happens to image-sharing sites, but I can trim references to them when they get sick.